Gov. Rick Snyder plans to announce today that he will appoint an emergency financial manager to stop Detroit’s financial freefall, sources said Thursday — a decision sure to ignite anger among some after months of intensive work to reverse the city’s course.

High-level city officials have been told Snyder will make the announcement at noon today and has invited a select group of clergy, community leaders and residents to attend. The announcement will be made at the Detroit Public Television studio in the Maccabees Building on Woodward.

The announcement will mark a historic transition in Motown, struggling for decades with falling tax revenues and the loss of manufacturing jobs and population unequaled among big U.S. cities.

Mayor Dave Bing said he spoke with Snyder on Thursday morning and was informed that the announcement would come today. Bing, attending a policy conference at the MotorCity %Casino Hotel, wouldn’t say what Snyder’s decision will be.

“I’ve got to let him make the announcement,” Bing told reporters. “I think everybody’s got a pretty good idea of what the announcement will be.”

Bing said he did not expect Snyder to immediately name the person who will serve as the emergency financial manager. Calling himself a team player, Bing said, “I’m more interested in, instead of fighting Lansing, in working with them.”

Snyder’s decision comes after a state review team report concluded last week that Detroit is in a financial emergency that it cannot fix on its own. The report detailed $14 billion in long-term bond debt and retiree pension and health benefits the city owes in addition to a $327-million accumulated deficit Detroit has been unable to tame. That figure could inflate by $100.million by July.

“It needs to be said over and over again, this is a problem that started 50 years ago,” said former City Councilwoman Sheila Cockrel, a political consultant. “It’s a can that’s been kicked down the road for decades, and there’s no more can and there’s no more road.”

Longtime political analyst Greg Bowens said he’s heard from city officials about state Treasurer Andy Dillon — a key Snyder aide who has overseen a nearly year-old consent agreement between the city and state — now trying to convince city leaders that an emergency financial manager could pull off a significant amount of restructuring in 18 months, a timetable Bowens and other critics say is questionable.

“Everything I’ve been hearing has been in the language of the conquered, capitulating to the appointment of an emergency manager,” said Bowens, who was a spokesman for former Mayor Dennis Archer.

Last week, Bing summoned members of Detroit’s delegation of state lawmakers to the Manoogian Mansion, the mayoral residence. Two legislators who attended the meeting, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Free Press that they left with the impression of a mayor resigned to handing over the reins to a state-appointed financial manager.

Bing told the delegation he still believed in his turnaround plan, even if Snyder did not. One of the lawmakers said the usual conversation — sometimes critical, sometimes a challenging back-and-forth — was gone.

“There was none of that this time,” the lawmaker said. “It was a really sad moment. You’re sitting in the Manoogian, a beautiful home that has such meaning for the city, and it’s come to this. It’s a little bit like a death.”

The other legislator said he did not see a mayor willing to keep fighting, but rather “a guy who said he’s done everything he could.”

“To characterize it very candidly, every time I looked down the table, I saw a guy with one of those billboards that say, ‘The end is near,’.” the lawmaker said.

While others have declared their candidacy or intentions to run for mayor of Detroit this year, Bing has not. The filing deadline is in May.

Publicly, Bing reiterated Thursday that Detroit will need Lansing’s help no matter what the solution is.

Underscoring the urgency of the crisis, Snyder said last week that he believes much of what he wants done — a bottom-up restructuring of city operations, addressing restrictions written into the city’s charter, investing in information technology upgrades and other “very challenging problems” — can be implemented by November 2014.

“It’s all about the numbers,” Bing said. “And anybody who’s been following the numbers in Detroit knows that the numbers are not good and they’re not going to change dramatically anytime soon. So there are things Lansing can do to help to get us out of this situation faster than we can do it by ourselves.”

Exactly whom Snyder will send to Detroit is now the next big decision residents and other stakeholders must await. Political analysts say they suspect Snyder’s been searching for an out-of-state figure with broad finance and managerial experience, and likely someone who is African American, to oversee a city that is more than 80% black.

Word of Snyder’s announcement comes as opposition to an emergency financial manager appointment grows. The Detroit Branch NAACP, one of the state’s most influential civil rights organizations, urged Snyder on Tuesday to not appoint one and instead work in partnership with the city.

The appointment will come as the campaign for the next mayor of Detroit gains steam. Mayoral candidates Lisa Howze, Krystal Crittendon, Mike Duggan and Benny Napoleon have come out against an emergency financial manager, with Howze, Crittendon and Napoleon questioning whether the State of Michigan exaggerated Detroit’s financial obligations to justify appointment of an outside manager.

The council and the mayor’s seat are up for re-election — with a primary in August and a general election in November — and the state’s intervention likely will be a key issue for voters.

Napoleon said in a statement that he questions why the city’s water department debt was included in Detroit’s long-term obligations when the department itself is a revenue-generating division with debts secured by its assets and fees paid by customers. He and Howze also questioned why debts owed 25-30 years from now are cause for immediate crisis.

“The governor and treasurer owe the City of Detroit and the rest of the world an immediate and thorough explanation as to how they justify these discrepancies,” Napoleon said. “These findings, if verified, are cause for grave concern because it would be unconscionable that they would have the bond market and the entire world believe that the City of Detroit is in the verge of fiscal collapse — and even worse — days away from stripping Detroit of its democracy under false pretenses.”

Bing was asked about Howze’s assertions that long-term debt obligations are around $2.billion, rather than the $14-billion figure put forth by the review team.

“I could do a long dissertation on that,” he said, “but there’s a lot of truth to it.”

Bing said that a large share of the city’s projected long-term debt and liabilities are associated with Detroit’s water department, but that agency has revenue streams that would allow them to “pay their own debt down, so that it’s not coming out of the general fund.”